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Related papers: Mollification Effects of Policy Gradient Methods

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The shift toward interacting with frozen, "black-box" Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed prompt engineering from a heuristic exercise into a critical optimization challenge. We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Krishna Sayana , Ketan Todi , Ambarish Jash

While reinforcement learning methods have delivered remarkable results in a number of settings, generalization, i.e., the ability to produce policies that generalize in a reliable and systematic way, has remained a challenge. The problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Simon Ståhlberg , Blai Bonet , Hector Geffner

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms still suffer from high sample complexity despite outstanding recent successes. The need for intensive interactions with the environment is especially observed in many widely popular policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Samuele Tosatto , Joao Carvalho , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

Tasks involving locally unstable or discontinuous dynamics (such as bifurcations and collisions) remain challenging in robotics, because small variations in the environment can have a significant impact on task outcomes. For such tasks,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Alisa Allaire , Christopher G. Atkeson

Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Tianbing Xu

We propose an exploration method that incorporates look-ahead search over basic learnt skills and their dynamics, and use it for reinforcement learning (RL) of manipulation policies . Our skills are multi-goal policies learned in isolation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-21 Arpit Agarwal , Katharina Muelling , Katerina Fragkiadaki

Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Sarah Müller , Alexander von Rohr , Sebastian Trimpe

Multi-task learning is a very challenging problem in reinforcement learning. While training multiple tasks jointly allow the policies to share parameters across different tasks, the optimization problem becomes non-trivial: It remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Ruihan Yang , Huazhe Xu , Yi Wu , Xiaolong Wang

The difficulty in specifying rewards for many real-world problems has led to an increased focus on learning rewards from human feedback, such as demonstrations. However, there are often many different reward functions that explain the human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Zaynah Javed , Daniel S. Brown , Satvik Sharma , Jerry Zhu , Ashwin Balakrishna , Marek Petrik , Anca D. Dragan , Ken Goldberg

Deep neural policies have recently been installed in a diverse range of settings, from biotechnology to automated financial systems. However, the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the value function leads to concerns on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Ezgi Korkmaz

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising direction to exploit massive amount of offline data for complex decision-making tasks. Due to the distribution shift issue, current offline RL algorithms are generally designed to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Rui Yang , Chenjia Bai , Xiaoteng Ma , Zhaoran Wang , Chongjie Zhang , Lei Han

In this paper, we aim to utilize only offline trajectory data to train a policy for multi-objective RL. We extend the offline policy-regularized method, a widely-adopted approach for single-objective offline RL problems, into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-05 Qian Lin , Chao Yu , Zongkai Liu , Zifan Wu

Robust imitation learning using disturbance injections overcomes issues of limited variation in demonstrations. However, these methods assume demonstrations are optimal, and that policy stabilization can be learned via simple augmentations.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Hirotaka Tahara , Hikaru Sasaki , Hanbit Oh , Brendan Michael , Takamitsu Matsubara

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Zhiao Huang , Litian Liang , Zhan Ling , Xuanlin Li , Chuang Gan , Hao Su

Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Wenjie Shi , Shiji Song , Cheng Wu

Deep learning and reinforcement learning methods have recently been used to solve a variety of problems in continuous control domains. An obvious application of these techniques is dexterous manipulation tasks in robotics which are…

This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-29 Milad Kazemi , Sadegh Soudjani

In this paper, we present a methodology to deploy the deterministic policy gradient method, using actor-critic techniques, when the optimal policy is approximated using a parametric optimization problem, where safety is enforced via hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-23 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon